A few months ago, I purchased this pair of Vibram Sprints from Zombie Runner in Palo Alto. Yes, they look funny and I had to endure my coworkers laughing at my “frog feet,” but they are incredibly comfortable, and solve a lot of my shoe woes. I felt weird wearing flip-flops (too casual) and sneakers (too sporty?) to work all the time, so I was looking for comfortable flats, but then they either gave me blisters or my feet were too sweaty in them. Now I just wear my vibrams all the time….EXCEPT when they smell so bad I decide to give them a rest/wash.

So after a few days of continuous wear, they really start to smell BAD. Washing them in the washing machine seems to work fine, but once they were really really dirty, and it they came out of the washer a little dirty still. The best way to wash them seems to be to wash them in the sink with some soap and a toothbrush, so you can really get into all the toe areas. Also, odor-destroying shoe/foot powder seems to keep the smell under control enough to wear it for a few more days… ALSO someone recommended buying socks to wear with it, and said that that helped tremendously with the stench. The socks aren’t cheap though, coming in at about $12 each, and I’d probably have to buy at least 5 pairs if I want to wear them all the time?

All in all, best shoe purchase I’ve ever made, and I’d highly recommend them to anyone who likes toe freedom and walking barefoot =)

I’ve recently started taking pottery classes at Blossom Hill Crafts, and I love it! I’ve started a blog at jeanspottery.wordpress.com to keep track of my progress as well as keep track of what glazes I use for which pieces and how they turn out. Tune in if you’re interested in how my classes are going…

Also, I’m sort of addicted to watching other people throw on the pottery wheel on YouTube…

For anyone who is learning Chinese, this add-on is a must have…I used to spent a lot of time copy-and-pasting text over to websites like pin1yin1 so that it would give me the pinyin equivalent, since I grew up speaking Mandarin, but my reading is rusty at best. I thought it would be useful to have something that auto-displays the pinyin of characters when you select or hover-over characters, and did a quick search to find ChinesePera-kun. After following the instructions to install it for Firefox 3.5, I enabled it by clicking on the little blue circle on my toolbar to toggle it on. This is what it looks like if I hover over something:

If you’re been in the Bay Area and see a far-area white dome on the top of a mountain, you’re probably looking at Lick Observatory, home to the second largest telescope in the U.S. (as well as many other telescopes). We made it up there a few weekends back for a night of their Music of the Spheres concert series. The drive up was treacherous, and involved a lot of driving up the mountain precariously right next to sudden cliffs with no guard rails. Needless to say, we were happy when we approached the Observatory (though I was not looking forward to the ride home in the dark).

We arrived around 7:30 so we were able to look around before the sunset. The view was incredible, like being on the top of the world (or at least, top of the Bay Area). Here’s a view of some of the windy roads we drove up to get to the Observatory:

Finally, we got there! We were allowed to wander around a bit, then an hour-long concert. After that we attended a great lecture about Adaptive Optics. We were able to look through some of the Observatory’s telescopes, and later we saw Jupiter through some amateur astronomers’ telescope outside of the building. Here’s one of the telescopes we looked through:

It’s a bit of a drive (over an hour from South Bay), but totally worth it. If you can get them, the Summer Visitor Program tickets are significantly cheaper and feature two astronomy talks (but no concert or free mug). They sell out almost immediately though, or so I’ve heard. Not that I didn’t enjoy the concert, but when you drive 1.5 hours to an Observatory, astronomy is the main attraction =)

We recently had some friends over for brunch. Tyler’s menu item was grilled cheese, so we bought some provolone, gouda and cheddar. However, because there were so many other things to eat (french toast, croissants, scrambled eggs, and fruit), he ended up just making two grilled cheese sandwiches and cutting them in quarters. They were delicious, but we were/are left with tons of cheese! So we had a grilled cheese dinner where we sampled grilled cheese made from all three types. Here are the sandwiches with handy labels =)

This past weekend, we took Tyler’s mom (who was visiting from Ohio) to an Art and Wine Festival in Palo Alto. I’d been to a few last year, but this one had by far the best artists. It also had some cool chalk drawings that people did over the two days. Because we went both days, we were able to see some of the pieces halfway done and then almost completely done: